Very Kafkaesque and absurdist Russian satire.
An average middle management type, Aleksei Varakin (Leonid Filatov), travels by train from his Moscow factory to a small town in order to have a meeting with the head of an air conditioner manufacturer. He comes up against a wall of bureaucracy and things that don't work and soon finds he cannot leave.
Odd and irrational events take place around him — he meets a nude secretary when he visits an air-conditioning company, a chef commits suicide after he refuses to eat a cake modeled after his own head, and then he somehow gets entangled in a local fight between Soviet traditionalists and people that want rock'n'roll...